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Time to nominate Wirral's Young Heroes

NOMINATIONS are now being taken for this year's Wirral Young Heroes awards.

The winners will be announced during an Oscars-style awards event on June 27 at The Floral Pavilion in New Brighton.

Set up in 2011, they were founded by local charity Wirral Youth for Christ (YFC) as a grassroots response to the riots that rocked the whole nation.

In the summer of that year, YFC took a group of 'young heroes' on a humanitarian mission to central India.

The small group of young people raised over £15,000 to make the trip possible and sourced 1000s of crayons, colouring books and modelling balloons to give the poverty stricken children they met.

Martin Dickson, founder of the Youth Heroes Awards, said: "The riots were reported in India as a major youth uprising and it seemed that many people here in the UK felt this way too.

"A selfish, careless and hopelessly self-centred section of society that are a burden!

"Clearly though, there was a disparity between this view of young people and those that I knew; I felt compelled to act."

He added: "The riots may have shown us that there's a problem with youth disorder, but it's only a small part of that picture.

"Wirral is home to thousands of young heroes and we set out to find the most inspirational of them.

"Our aim was to give our communities an opportunity to publicly thank and affirm their young heroes for all that they do, and to highlight them as a small glimpse of the massive majority of young people in the Wirral."

Community groups, teachers, parents and many others who work with youth are encouraged to nominate their young heroes for the 2014 awards.